Note about "1.2.3" style of version numbers.

As haukex points out in Re: What basic things should I know about versioning modules?, that style of version numbering is discouraged.

One practice that some have recommended - and I adopted - is to to zero-pad the "minor" and "patch" parts of the version number and omit the .

Examples: 1.0203 or 1.002003

Caveat: While Perl allows embedding _ within numbers for readability, CPAN uses the _ in a version number to denote that the version is "beta release" and will continue to list the most recent version without a _ as the current stable release.

our $VERSION = 1.002003;  # CPAN stable release

our $VERSION = 1.002_003; # CPAN beta release

To Perl, both will be parsed as the number 1.002003